News/Press
• Two Coats of Paint - January 2024
Cordy Ryman, maestro of the quotidian
by Sharon Butler
"While nostalgia and the yearning it precipitates may be gripping the art world, Cordy Ryman’s gently dazzling painting installations, on view at Freight + Volume, are unapologetically about the here and now – that is, what’s happening in one place, today. Titled “Monkey Mind Symphony,” the show captures the distractions we encounter day by day, minute by minute. What could be more apt for our time than a visual language comprising more than a hundred small, curious objects? Logically, they are the physical manifestations of tweets or threads, crafted easily, sometimes beguilingly unfinished in the traditional sense of the word, and arranged so as to radiate Ryman’s idiosyncratic energy.”
• The Brooklyn Rail - December 2023
Cordy Ryman “Monkey Mind Symphony”
by Ekin Erkan
"A good deal has been said about the ‘revisability’ of Ryman’s arrangements, though curating with a spatial logic at hand would undo much of the discordance that makes his groupings (all of which are self-curated) so effective. Syntheses of supposedly dichotomous categories—e.g., figuration and abstraction, sculpture and painting—are ultimately of secondary import to Ryman’s spatial plying…
“This show demonstrates that although Ryman’s ‘causalist’ rhetoric rebuffs the notion of a motif, it heralds a language. Spatial idiom tethers his blocks and boxes together. By grouping disconnected and disengaged compositional elements, Ryman has figured one of his most unified and effective exhibitions yet.”
• The Brooklyn Rail (Instagram Video) - November 2023
“Monkey Mind Symphony”
"Artist Cordy Ryman (@cordyrymanstudio) gives us a glimpse into the works in his exhibition Monkey Mind Symphony, which will open at Freight+Volume (@Freightandvolumegallery) on November 17th, and run through December 22nd.”
• MÜNCHNER FEUILLETON - June 2023
Flying Sparks on White
by Christine Pfau
“One enters the gallery rooms… only to stop immediately spellbound: What on earth is that, one asks oneself, delighted and confused. So many little and itty-little cubes on one side, and many more frames stacked on top of each other on the other. And the most amazing thing: Individual cubes and frames emit a soft light, as if someone had just flipped the switch. New York artist Cordy Ryman must have a Bob the Builder gene, which he lives out uninhibitedly. The individual elements of the murals were delivered in three huge boxes, and then it took days until they were all in the right place, says Walter Storms.”
• The Brooklyn Rail (Video Interview)- June 26, 2023
New Social Environment #836: A conversation between Cordy Ryman and Jeffrey Grunthaner
• BOMB Magazine - July 18, 2022
Finding Your Own Path: Erika Ranee Interviewed by Cordy Ryman
“While I can’t remember exactly when I first saw Erika Ranee’s work, I’d come across it over the years, and it always appealed to me. I became more familiar with it in the spring of 2021 when I was at Freight + Volume installing my own show and spent some time with Erika’s works in the back room. I liked the comfortable, effortless way she seemed to use colors, and I felt a kinship with the free use of abstraction, compositional parameters, and structures. Poured color, layers, drawing, evaporation, and chance all blended into a single organism. The works seemed to breath, were natural, alive, and true, not contrived, stifled, or trapped. After this I started following Erika’s work more closely, and we began conversing.
—Cordy Ryman”
• Hyperallergic - April 2, 2021
Cordy Ryman’s Stubborn Joy
by John Yau
“In his current exhibition, Cordy Ryman: Constellations, at Freight + Volume, Ryman’s debut with this storefront gallery on the Lower East Side, the artist made a specific installation for each of its three joined spaces. ‘Hall Wave II’ (2021) narrows and evens out the long, irregular space of the first room. The installation consists of an undulating row of two-by-four planks leaned against an elevated support a considerable distance from the wall, shrinking the room’s navigable space.”
• The Brooklyn Rail - April 2021
Cordy Ryman Constellations
by David Rhodes
“Cordy Ryman has long made a practice of installing works to suit the context of a specific gallery space, and his current exhibition at Freight + Volume is no different. Ryman, for example, places Hall Wave II (2021), an undulating, vertical, fence-like assemblage, along one wall of the gallery’s narrow front gallery. Likewise, the four ‘Constellations’—East, West, South, and North (all 2021)—are wall-based configurations of small scale works that radiate out according to a matrix that anchors them and provides underlying structure to the way they inhabit Freight + Volume’s second, more squarely proportioned, space. Despite this environmental specificity, however, the composition of the works could be altered by switching out pieces one for another without undermining the integrity of the structure as a whole.”
• Observer - October 10, 2019
Ethan and Cordy Ryman Have a Plan for Creating Affordable Studio Space for Artists: Meet ‘Art Cake’
by Helen Holmes
"Founded by Ethan and Cordy Ryman, Art Cake's objective is to provide artists with a space to generate work without the pressures of gallery expectations.
Within the traditional parameters of a gallery structure, everything hinges on the dealer’s ability to market their artists and an artist’s ability to produce work that garners a lot of interest. These are pressure-cooker circumstances, even with the provisions of ample time that some gallerists bestow upon their creative charges, and things have only gotten more high-stakes lately as decades-old galleries fold up for good and the biggest ones get even bigger. The artists Cordy and Ethan Ryman are attempting to subvert these punishing expectations with Art Cake, an artistic production space that they opened on September 7, 2019 in Sunset Park, Brooklyn.”
• Bklynr - October 22, 2019
Art Cake: A Self-Sustaining Affordable Studio Program for Artists
Pamela Wong
"SUNSET PARK – Two artist brothers opened a new arts facility in Sunset Park last month providing space and affordable studios for production and creatives.
“Art Cake debuted on September 7 at 214 40th Street (between 2nd and 3rd Avenues) in Sunset Park. The 13,000-square-foot former industrial building was gutted to include studio spaces on the upper level and a flexible 5,000-square-foot ground-floor space for exhibits, film/photo shoots, and specials events. Operating on a self-sustaining model, following the inaugural exhibition by artist Suzanne Bocanegra, the ground floor will be rented out to creative businesses. Revenue generated from the multi-functional space will support Art Cake’s studio program to maintain affordable workspace for artists.”
• Voyage Houston - May 2, 2018
Art & Life with Cordy Ryman
"Cordy, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
“I grew up in a family of artists in New York. While I was in high school, I became interested in sculpture and began creating figurative works with expressive faces. Working from this emotional place making stone and woodcarving, I attended School of Visual Arts in New York where I was in Maura Sheehan’s class and further developed my practice in abstract painting and sculpture…”
• The Brooklyn Rail - July/August 2017
Free Fall
by Colin Edgington
"Seen from the street, color breaks through the facade of an office building to mingle with the dynamism of the city. Sectioned lines of pinks, greens, whites, oranges, blues, and their pastel counterparts weave between the reflections of cars, pedestrians, foliage, buildings, and skylight. On the other side of the glittering glass, occupying an otherwise nondescript office building, is Tower 49 Gallery, the location of Cordy Ryman’s yearlong installation, FREE FALL. Initially, it may seem a strange place for Ryman’s sculptural-painterly hybrids. Tower 49, designed by starchitecture firm SOM (Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP), is a blue-tinted glass building, forty-five stories tall and shaped like a skewed “H.” But therein lies the brilliance of Ryman’s works in this space: they contradictorily seek to both blend into and stand out from the building. By their very condition, the works break the austerity of the high-end interior with scraps, clasps, bright colors, and collage-like applications. The antipodal nature of the space and Ryman’s works form a deeper meaning in which each reflects its opposite. They reveal what is hidden in each other.”
• Hyperallergic - October 16, 2016
Simple Pleasures
by John Yau
"In his best works Cordy Ryman makes something visually arresting out of ordinary materials and paint — stuff you can buy in a hardware store.
“There is something wonderfully democratic about Cordy Ryman’s approach to art. His basic material is a length of two-by-four, augmented by wood scraps, eyebolts, and paint (acrylic, enamel, encaustic, shellac, and fluorescent) — stuff you can buy in a hardware store, none of it expensive. He doesn’t send his work out to be fabricated, nor does he try to impress you with how much labor (usually done by others) goes into the work. He has not bought into the Age of Excess…”
• Hyperallergic - August 2, 2014
The Familiar, the Boisterous, the Unexpected, and the Absurd
Thomas Micchelli
"It seems a little unfair to encumber an exhibition with a title like OK Great REALLY this is ALSO RIDICULOUS. With its overtones of exasperation and disparagement, the phrase sends confusing signals about what’s in store and how seriously to take it. But the show hooks you in an instant and holds you for a good, long time.”
• ArtForum - October 2013
Critic’s Picks - My Crippled Friend
Kris Paulsen
"Rosalind Krauss once quoted Barnett Newman defining sculpture as ‘what you bump into when you back up to see a painting,’ thereby describing its negative condition under modernism: One knows sculpture by what it is not—not architecture, not landscape, and, importantly, not painting. ‘My Crippled Friend,’ curated by Michael Goodson and Patrick O’Rorke, is an expansive, rowdy exhibition of more than one hundred recent paintings determined to hold onto modernism’s investment in color, pigment, and nonobjective abstraction while also escaping its ‘negative condition.’ These works insist on becoming something clearly definable and namable: things—painted things—that one might bump into or trip over while trying to understand them as paintings.”
• Modern Painters - May 2013
Cordy Ryman - Shuffle, Scrap, Echo
by Christopher Howard
"A highly pleasurable aspect of Cordy Ryman’s work is that just by looking at it, you can see how each piece was made. Humble and unpretentious, the twelve handmade, wall-mounted wooden objects in Shuffle/Scrap/Echo are fashioned from materials common to construction sites or a carpenter’s shop: lumber, sawdust, and acrylic and enamel paint, but also epoxy resin, urethane foam, and Velcro. Using neither tricks nor gimmicks when covering things with paint and gluing them together, Ryman tenders an art that is honest rather than factual, injecting a stale formalism with new life though a playful, idiosyncratic approach.”
• The Brooklyn Rail - May 2013
Adaptive Radiation
by Alex Bacon
"Intentionally or not, Cordy Ryman’s use of the biological term ‘adaptive radiation’ suggests the rhythmic relationship between his radiating patterns of paint and materials and their underlying, obdurate physicality. In ‘ES Spiral Trim Maze’ (2013) a coil of white paint elicits a gentle optical pulse as it directs the eye back and forth across a loose arrangement of differently sized and colored pieces of wood. Optical ‘radiation’ is ‘adapted’ to a given work’s physical components, such that it does not overpower, but rather compliments, and even improves upon what artist-critic Thomas Micchelli has recently characterized as a ‘slacker’ or ‘dumpster’ aesthetic of artfully disheveled arrangements of materials and colors.”
• ArtForum - February 2013
Cordy Ryman - Critics’ Picks
by David Rhodes
"The twelve works in this exhibition hew to methods familiar to Cordy Ryman’s 2010 solo show at DCKT Contemporary in New York—though in the present gathering, greater success is achieved both by the installation as a whole and in the individual pieces, showing Ryman to be really hitting his stride. His fluent constructions are built, cut, painted, dismantled, and reassembled out of scraps of material including wood, glue, staples, sawdust, Velcro, and reused unsuccessful or even completed work; the result is painting made with a sculptor’s desire. Within only two years it has become possible to speak of a signature style in his work, and one within which, it is important to add, there is ample freedom for nuance, development, and change.”
• New American Paintings - 2013
A Conversation - Cordy Ryman
by Arthur Peña
"I recently saw my first Ryman pieces in person at the Dallas Art Fair. Dodge Gallery had a piece made of 2 x 4’s, painted and hanging on the wall. There was also a corner piece comprised of stacked 2x4’s painted with soft, shiny colors. Upon closer inspection of the corner piece I noticed hand writing that indicated some sort of possible measurement. I couldn’t tell because Ryman had cut the wood off before the information could be fully retained. But the markings were just enough to show his hand. I mean this in both that it injected the work with a very direct connection to the artist in what could otherwise be mistaken to be a minimalist corner sculpture and it also showed his hand in the sense of a “reveal”, exposing the transparency of the process of making that Ryman is so willing to offer. After mounting his first solo show with Dodge Gallery, Adaptive Radiation, and just finishing up a public commission at Michigan State University, Ryman and I had a conversation.”
• SFGate - November 10, 2011
Cordy Ryman: Fluent in Abstract Art
by Kimberly Chun
"Cordy Ryman grew up steeped in art-making, so it's no surprise that it's second nature to the New York City artist.
“‘I grew up around a lot of painting,’ Ryman says by phone. He's the son of painters Robert Ryman and Merrill Wagner, brother of sculptor Will Ryman and half-brother to artist Ethan Ryman (also known for his engineering work with the Wu-Tang Clan and other hip-hop artists). ‘Everyone in my family is an artist, strangely enough.’
“And to Cordy Ryman's credit, his work bears little resemblance to his father's minimalist white-on-white masterworks, his mother's abstractions on steel or sibling Will's whimsical figurative pieces. Consider the 39-year-old artist's works, often combining painting and three-dimensional elements, as both a response and reaction to his family's explorations.”
• The New York Times - October 29, 2010
Cordy Ryman
by Roberta Smith
“Cordy Ryman’s show of home-spun abstract reliefs, corner sculptures and false walls — cobbled together mostly from wood, paint, glue, Velcro and staples — is one of the sleepers of the fall season.
“Mr. Ryman is a consummate recycler, even of his own art. Several works here are assembled from square dowels painted in pale shades of yellow and blue and a strong pink. The painted wood was salvaged from a large installation piece titled “Third Wave” that wound through Mr. Ryman’s New York solo debut at this gallery in early 2009 like a cheerful dune fence.”